User Interface Streamlining
I'd like to see some streamlining to the user interface. The following are my observations based on my 30 years of experience writing user interface software professionally: * Given that this is incremental/idle game is highly technical to start with, there is quite a lot of wasted vertical and horizontal space throughout the UI ** The top level buttons seem to be fine ** The statistics summaries have about 5 - 8 pixels of wasted vertical whitespace between the header and their constituent values ** On the investments page, the outer wrapper for the inner panels which contains the quantity selections and whatnot, has a lot of wasted space between the buttons and the first panels. It eats up territory in the browser. In addition, the buttons could likely be reduced in size and placed elsewhere. Perhaps move the investment panels to the left about 25 pixels and then put them in a 3rd column on the right. ** The investments panels have similar wasted vertical whitespace and some layout consolidation could really help present more data to the user. While it's visually nice to have a somewhat sparse layout, there is just far too much wasted whitespace throughout, and there is a lot of data to convey. For these panels it might be worth having them be 3 rows (without the header). Row 1 would have the Units/Footprint/Cost horizontally. Row 2 would have the output/restrictions/requirements fields. Finally Row 3 would have the activation buttons for that investment. The goal here is to vertically shrink them so more investments fit in the viewport without having to scroll, particularly when there are so many dependencies. I find myself in scrollbar hades buying investments ** I really like the Summary page. Leave it alone. Never ever touch it. :) ** Missions and Systems suffer the same vertical spacing issues that the investments panels do. If you can rework them similarly to my suggestions for investments, you could fit a lot more information in the viewport for users without having to scroll ** The Science panels have WAY too much vertical whitespace. It's probably my least favorite set of panels in the game to deal with because of the over the top whitespace on each panel. Now granted, I'm not suggesting something like Anti-Idle, where every section of every viewport is so heavily crammed with stuff that you can't find anything. I'm just suggesting that there's a LOT of shrinking that can be done without losing the look/feel you're after. * I'd move the Options button as an icon in the application titlebar line. Where your ALPHA tags are, perhaps locate it just to the left of the upper right ALPHA header * UI responsiveness seems to be a tad on the laggy side. I know there's a lot going on under the hood, that it's Unity, and that it's alpha/beta. Just something to keep in mind when you start optimizing * When the application is not the foreground application in Windows 7, updates are not made to the UI. So one can't watch a movie or do whatever in a 2nd window while they're watching their numbers in First Empire to see when they have reached something that they may want to purchase. It definitely needs to continue to operate even when the window is not the foreground window on a system